1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to fireplace heating systems, and particularly to tubular grate systems where air is circulated through a grate.
2. General Description of the Prior Art
Since the era of fuel shortage commenced a few years ago, a great emphasis has been placed upon the use of wood as a source of heat. It followed that instead of fireplaces being used largely for decoration and aesthetic warmth, they should provide a significant amount of heat. Perhaps the first approach to the improvement of fireplace efficiency was to employ double walled fireplace liners and thus to, in effect, make something of a stove of a fireplace by circulating air through the double walls. Thousands of these have been made and used with considerable success. Considering that such units are fairly costly and somewhat difficult to install, other approaches and configurations of fireplace type heaters have evolved. Perhaps the most prominent of these has been to employ some form of tubular grate. The most common type of these employs a series of side-by-side pipe loops, each lying in a vertical plane and wherein cool air enters lower ends of the loops and heated air exits at higher positioned ends of the loops.
For effectiveness, it is pretty much required that a glass screen be employed over a fireplace opening if much heat is to be obtained from a fireplace. This then meant that with tubular grates, pipes would have to extend through the glass screen. As a further adjunct, room air is typically forced through tubular grates by a blower which, for lack of any other place to put it, typically rests on a hearth in front of the fireplace. This is both unsightly and noisy.
Considering the foregoing, it is the object of this invention to provide an improved fireplace heater which may be used with any fireplace screen, where there are no air pipes passing through the fireplace opening, and while employing a blower, the blower is located so as to be unobtrusive and to cause little room noise.